> execs being misinformed about what their own companies are doing/achieving with AI
And a bunch of yes-men down the lower layers of management funneling these ideas.
In a meeting at my last job, one of the execs was bragging about how a chatbot was reading Jira customer service tickets and calling tools/APIs to solve those tickets, and it "only costs 1.5USD per ticket. How much would a human cost, huh?"
Little did the exec know, but my team was already using a ~600 lines python script to solve the problem with a higher rate of precision. The chatbot-automation thing was largely pushed by my manager when I was out on vacation, just so he could earn his good-boy points with higher ups. Worst manager I've had in my 14 years of career btw.
Damn, if the future is so uncertain that it changes at every month, maybe I don't even want to be ahead!
I would want to use the anxious low ranking pioneers as scouts that face all the risks while I have more freedom to change course once the winds are more favorable.
One of the smartest people for whom I ever worked was fond of saying about such situations that “you almost never want to be the first one up the beach.” I saw him get that right over and over again.
Goes to show how infested with disconnected management this industry is.
All the tools that improved productivity for software devs (Docker, K8S/ECS/autoscaling, Telemetry providers) took very long for management to realize they bring value, and in some places with a lot of resistance. Some places where I worked, asking for an IntelliJ license would make your manager look at you like you were asking "hey can I bang your wife?".
Sorry for not contributing to the discussion (as per the guidelines), but is it just me or this blog post reads a lot like LLM-filled mumble jumble? Seems like I could trim half of the words there and nothing would be lost.
Software dev has been promoted as a good career path for almost 2 decades now. Naturally you'll have a bunch of people going in only because of money.
A few years ago, when Agile was still the hot thing and companies had an Agile "facilitor" or manager for each dev team, the common career path I heard when talking to those people was: "I worked as a java/cobol/etc in the past, but it just didn't click with me. I'm more of a peoples person, you know, so project management is where I really do my best work!".
Look I already told you, I deal with the @#$% customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people, can't you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!
And a bunch of yes-men down the lower layers of management funneling these ideas.
In a meeting at my last job, one of the execs was bragging about how a chatbot was reading Jira customer service tickets and calling tools/APIs to solve those tickets, and it "only costs 1.5USD per ticket. How much would a human cost, huh?"
Little did the exec know, but my team was already using a ~600 lines python script to solve the problem with a higher rate of precision. The chatbot-automation thing was largely pushed by my manager when I was out on vacation, just so he could earn his good-boy points with higher ups. Worst manager I've had in my 14 years of career btw.
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